The present invention relates generally to inventory control architectures, and more particularly, to recycle-supported inventory control systems and methods for integrally managing reusable component parts as taken out of the life cycle-terminated products and new articles purchased from suppliers to thereby control stock quantities thereof. This invention also relates to recording media for storage of an inventory control program(s).
As people's concerns in environments and recycle systems are increasing year by year, an environmental problem becomes an important issue to be handled by an entirety of society. In this social trend, in order to lessen loads to environments, a manufacturing company high in environmental consciousness is attempting to establish an industrial production system of the circulation type, which permits recovery or “salvage” of used products for recycle purposes rather than mere abolishment or scrapping thereof.
One prior art inventory management scheme in a physical distribution model for performing production of the circulation type has been disclosed in JP-A-11-120255. Firstly, with respect to commercial articles under inventory management, a shipment quantity of such articles is predicted based on shipment records in the past. In addition, a recovery quantity of the articles for sale is predicted based on either their recovery records or shipment records in the past. And a variation or fluctuation of the stock quantity of such articles is predicted based on inventory variation factors in addition to the shipment quantity and a prediction result of recovery quantity. Then, based on an inventory variation factor prediction result obtained in this way, determine the content of a inventory adjustment instruction.
The above-stated prior art is an inventory management technique in a physical distribution model of the so-called commercial article reciprocation type, which causes articles for sale to circulate while keeping their native forms without any form changes. However, in the currently distributed products in the marketplace, there are many products which do not reciprocate while keeping their forms unchanged but are to be reused after having disassembled into component parts or materials after collection for recovery and then subjected to regeneration or “rebirth” processing. In view of this, it has been required to establish an inventory management architecture in the circulation type physical distribution model which takes account of up to such the disassembly and reuse processes.
In an inventory management technology in the circulation type physical distribution model that also takes account of the disassembly and reuse processes, in order to further reduce the loads to environments, a need is felt to consider the following points: reusing a maximized number of component parts of a product collected for recovery; eliminating any futile works in the absence of reusability; delivering a promised product to a market or a customer exactly on a due date in a conventional way; and, minimizing costs for disassembly, regeneration and production or fabrication processes.